Thursday, September 11, 2008

"Hey Hey Fever" (MGM, 1935)

Normally I wouldn't talk about a 1930's MGM cartoon here. For the most part, I detest them. Hugh Harman and Rudolph Ising left Warner Bros. in 1934 to pursue greener pastures (and greener wallets) at MGM, and set out to copy Disney. One of their first efforts starred Bosko, in his original WB design, in color cavorting and singing in Mother Goose-land. I had never seen it until today, and I was rather disappointed. Bosko lost his edge. He's no longer funny here, at all. After this, they'd do one or two more Bosko cartoons using the traditional design, then morph him into a stereotypical black kid in a fomulaic series about him trying to keep a bag of cookies away from evil frogs.

2 comments:

This gives you an idea what Harman and Ising would have done if Leon Schlesinger had given them more money. It would have gone toward filling the screen with characters, shadows, perspective shots and hiring someone to write an operetta format. That was their raison d'etre for a cartoon; not to be funny.

Any idea if that's Billy Bletcher and Elvia Allman supplying some voices?